Alternate Day Fasting: Would You Try It? (PICTURES Extreme Diets)

Now the diet trend on everyone's lips is Alternate Day fasting (ADF), that not only helps weight loss but improves generl health and well-being. We can't help but wonder how it will measure up.

Don't fret it's not about completely starving yourself, but to cut down calorie intake to about 5-600 one day and eat whatever you want to following day. Then back to fasting for a day, and then to eating whatever you want. And so on and so forth.

An eight-week study on two groups of overweight patients following was carried out by Dr Krista Varady from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Perhaps surprisingly, she discovered that on the non-fasting days dieters could eat whatever they wanted and still reap rewards.

"If you were sticking to your fast days, then in terms of cardiovascular disease risk, it didn't seem to matter if you were eating a high-fat or low-fat diet on your feed (non-fast) days," she said.

Michael Moseley attempted the ADF diet on BBC's Horizon: Eat, Fast and Live Longer, but found the standard ADF diet too difficult to live by. He opted for an alternative version known as 5:2 - involving two days of fasting per week and five days of eating normally.

"I stuck to this diet for 5 weeks, during which time I lost nearly a stone and my blood markers, like IGF-1, glucose and cholesterol, improved. If I can sustain that, it will greatly reduce my risk of contracting age-related diseases like cancer and diabetes."

There is no concrete evidence that the ADF diet works, research is still being carried out.

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Dessert For Breakfast

It sounds too good to be true, but a group of scientists reckon they've figured out how to prevent weight-gain and food cravings - and it involves adding a cookie or a slice of cake to your breakfast.
Researchers from Tel Aviv University's Wolfson Medical Center in Israel believe that dieters would have less trouble fighting off pesky hunger pangs throughout the day if they ate a carbohydrate-rich, protein-packed breakfast - with a helping of dessert.
Read more here.